The graph presents real data, but it’s mislabeled and incorrectly explained. Specifically, the captions “Percent in Poor Health” and “Percent who Smoke” should say “In Poor Health” and “Smokers.” The graph’s bars do not represent the prevalence of smoking, poor health, etc. The bars represent the prevalence of strong Democratic and strong Republican party identification.

Here’s an explanation of the leftmost pair of bars in the graph. The other pairs are analogous.

In the GSS data set, 1,687 respondents reported both poor health and less than high school education. Among these 1,687 respondents, party affiliation went as follows:

Strong Dem: 27.0%
Not-Strong Dem: 23.6%
Independent near-Dem: 9.1%
Independent: 14.9%
Independent near-Rep: 4.6%
Not-Strong Rep: 11.2%
Strong Rep: 8.0%

Subramaniam and Perkins display the Strong Dem and Strong Rep percentages.

In other words, among people reporting poor health and less than a high school education, 27% call themselves strong Democrats and 8% call themselves strong Republicans.

Even if they’d explained it correctly, the data they present isn’t useful without more context and comparisons, and I’m not convinced there’s much enlightening here.

Among black smokers, about 36% call themselves strong Democrats and about 2% call themselves strong Republicans. Is anyone surprised?

The best thing about the article for me (and it’s a really good thing) is that it pointed me to the very cool online data tool on the GSS web site.

Steve

Certainly, I think that party allegiance is easier to switch than whether or not you have major health problems.

Another possible explanation is that there is no difference in health, but that Republicans are oblivious to problems (or Democrats see hobgoblins).

None of this explains the rate of smoking, though.